COLTER’S CREEK BUCK

One year, having returned to Texas for the Christmas season, I went back up to the deer pasture for what had once been a more common event in our family, which we called “the second hunt.” In the old days, my grandfather and his sons had spent many New Year’s Eves at the deer pasture, making a second hunt and welcoming the new year in that manner; though perhaps understandably, subsequent generations of us, somehow seeming to possess less leisure time have found ourselves hard-pressed to accommodate such an indulgence.

Beyond the icing-on-the-cake nature of going back a second time, the second hunt carried with it as well a cachet of wildness, in that New Year’s in the Hill Country was often when the fiercest, most inclement weather passed through, yielding occasional freak snowfalls—one of the rarest of rarities, and offering us the seldom-experienced opportunity to try to track our quarry in the slushy snow for those few hours before it melted. (More frequent were the violent and beautiful ice storms, which dragged down phone and power lines and shellacked the entire Hill Country with single-digit temperatures and cast a sparkling diamond glaze over every rock, tree, and road, and gave the juniper-tinged air an even sweeter taste than usual: ice-scrubbed air so fresh and clean, at those temperatures, that it seemed to reach farther into the lungs, providing more oxygen, more sustenance.)

It was the same year that I had brought my amazing bird dog down to Texas with me—Colter, a liver-colored German shorthair pointer, a great ground-covering big-headed sweet long-legged bomber of a hound with nitroglycerine running through his veins—so that I could travel the state south to north with him, hunting bobwhite quail in the brush country down near Corpus Christi and in the highlands up along the Colorado River. It was such a good year for quail that there were even large coveys of them in the Hill Country, and in my young man’s way, it was my intention to hunt them at the deer pasture, during my second hunt, before continuing up into the country on the upper Colorado.

In my mind, it was wonderfully rich and simple, if not excessive. I would hunt deer in the late afternoons and foggy, icy early mornings, then come back to camp midday for a warming meal and a fire, and take Colter out into the russet tallgrass to look for quail. It was dove season, too, and if I was lucky, I might have a chance to gather a few doves for dinner. Then I would return Colter to his kennel, put my shotgun up, and head back into the hills with my rifle, to sit on a rock ledge in the waning of the day to watch for deer. It was the year that my mother had died young after a long illness, and I have no doubt that in addition to my youthfulness, it was my relationship to the natural world, which was to say at that time chiefly as a hunter, that I turned to in part at least for grounding and support in this newer, lonelier, turned-upside down world.

It was painful, hiking those beautiful red granite canyons and sitting on those whale-gray ancient ledges of Cambrian sandstone, looking out at the same sights she had known and loved, though it was tonic, too, knowing that in the witnessing and the experiencing, these things were still shared between us, and always would be.

The first day, New Year’s Eve, hadn’t quite gone the way I’d intended. The evening before, my middle cousin, Randy, had driven up too, bringing his then-young son, Nathan, along with all kinds of items for our version of a New Year’s Eve revel: no fireworks, nor cases of whiskey, but big fat free-range steaks, ears of roasting corn, fresh butter, green olives, giant baking potatoes, eggs, cream, sugar, coffee—enough food to stay a week, instead of just a couple of evenings. We didn’t get to hunt much that first day, however, because we spent the day digging Randy’s big pickup out of the mud. It wasn’t really even mud at first, just soft soil beneath the litter of dark slick rained-upon oak leaves. Randy had left the gravel roadbed, was turning around to head back to camp for something, and had tried, inexplicably, to take a shortcut through the woods, where he quickly became stuck not just up to the axles—the usual barometer for such mishaps—but to the frame itself, so that he and Nathan had had to roll the windows down and climb out, unable to shove the doors open against the force and mass of so much mud, which had been rained upon almost ceaselessly for the last week.

Even from a distance, I could see the big blue truck—or the top half of it—when I came walking through the cold gloomy woods later that afternoon, with the steady rain still falling. As I drew closer, I could see the dark silhouette of Randy, barely visible in his rain-drenched camouflage amidst the dark trunks of the oaks, wielding a shovel, up to his ankles in soupy red mud, working as a farmer might labor in the stalls with his pitchfork.

He looked haunted, hopeless, mindless. He had been working for hours to no avail, for each shovel of slurry he pitched away was replaced within seconds by the porridge-like flow of new material from the freshly opened perimeters of his excavation, and perhaps most dispiriting of all, he could see none of his “progress,” for the entire operation lay beneath the mask of the slowly broadening milky-red lake of his making. He could hear the gravel and mud scraping against his shovel, could feel the leaden weight of it each time he lifted a dripping load of it, but could ascertain no progress; when he saw me come slogging in from out of the rain and gloom, his mud-streaked face brightened, he actually smiled a half-grin, and wordlessly, he handed me a second shovel.

The sides of the big truck were smeared with mud, as if it were a wild animal that had been chased there before finally being brought to bay—a short distance behind the truck, there were twin tracks of deep-standing water that reinforced this notion—and from inside the mud-splashed fuselage, and through the rain-streaked windows, as if in a French fine arts film, Nathan peered uncertainly, his face brightening too when he saw I had come to join them. In the fading light, he was bathed with the blue glow of the little portable VCR with which he and Randy sometimes traveled, the machine plugged into the cigarette lighter. (I was to find out later that Nathan had been forced by circumstance to endure seven consecutive showings of Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, a fact that would ultimately sour him on that which had once been his passionate favorite.) Nathan smiled, waved wanly, and from the dry captivity of the interior, continued to watch, with the sight of us shivering and steaming in muck that was now knee-deep evidently more interesting than an eighth showing.

Trying to use my little sled of a rent-car to pull the truck out was completely out of the question, as was calling in a tow truck from Johnson City, seventy icy miles away on a fast-gathering New Year’s Eve; indeed, the nearest pay phone was nearly twenty miles away. It was root hog or die, and strangely, or not so strangely, I was nonplussed by the size of the task. As much as anything—more than anything, perhaps—it grounded me in the moment, was both emblematic of and yet an escape for the grief and absence I’d been feeling all autumn and winter, in that first year of my mother’s death, and would feel for a long time after.

Even the act of walking around searching intently for a deer in this beloved landscape, intimately familiar to me since childhood, had at times left me unable to hold back or adequately process that enormity of loss; similarly, despite the tonic of nature, the reality and permanence of my loss—the alteration in the relationship—kept coming upon me as I sat quietly in the woods, focusing on the hunt, or focusing on not focusing, which is sometimes the best way to hunt.

This, however, was not a moment of sadness, nor cause for complaint. So what if we were wet and cold? I was relaxing at one of my favorite places in the world, I was young and strong and healthy, I was with some of my family, I was uncompromisingly in the midst of raw nature, and in this particular moment my life had a focused and immediate purpose. It was all nothing but good, and I worked with pleasure, and slowly, Randy’s attitude recovered, until, by the time darkness fell, we were working in concert.

We were not making any progress: beneath us, we could continue to feel the walls of our mudpit oozing to fill back in with the quicksand-slurry whatever we managed, with our aching backs, to export. Inside the darkened truck, the blue light of the VCR came on again—though still Nathan turned away and peered back down at us from time to time, as if to reassure himself that the truck would sink no deeper.

Somewhere down in the mire, there was a jack—in addition to trying to dig out a new lane, like the exit ramp from a subterranean parking garage, up and out of which we might one day—perhaps tomorrow?—be able to drive, we were attempting to hoist each wheel free of the muck’s embrace, just high enough to place a flat stone, or a laddersticking of branches, beneath each tire, to help give traction at that point far into the unknown future when we might deem our endeavor sufficiently advanced to hazard a try at driving out.

So deep-sunk were the wheels, however, that we were having to kneel on all fours to reach beneath them, and even then we found ourselves working in water and slurry up to our necks, and then our chins, and then our noses, tilting our heads sideways, straining to shove a flat stone into the breath of space between tire and temporary bottom-muck; and again, hearing us thumping around beneath the truck, Nathan peered down anxiously and studied without comment the assemblage of various-sized sticks and branches that kept popping to the surface and floating all around us like so many circling alligators.

It was getting colder, and with nightfall, Randy pulled out his ever-trusty Coleman lantern and with shaking, frigid fingers, pumped up the pressure and then grubbed a match crookedly against the matchbox, Jack London-style. The match caught, and, shivering, he shoved it up through the baffling and into the glass globe, where the tiny tapered flame found the serpent-hiss of compressed gas and blossomed into a magnificent burst of light that captured and encompassed immediately the cast of all of our work, the scene of ruination that surrounded us: the swamp, where before there had been no swamp. And although it cheered us to have light in which to work, there was an awkward period of transition in which we had to accustom ourselves to the psychology of the new reality, and in this, despite our efforts at sunny optimism, we were not initially successful, erring at first on the side of despair.

The lantern’s throw of bright light possessed a peculiar trajectory, fading quickly from an incandescent whiteness that was almost spiritual in quality to a softer and more mellow tone of yellow and then gold before finally, at its farthest reaches, dissolving into fairy dust–like pixels of barely illuminated drizzle. And because it was at these farthest reaches—not so far away, really—that our work extended, it gave us the perception that the entire world was a swamp—that for all our eyes told us, it might as well stretch to the horizon—and we were disoriented, even dispirited, but in the end, there was nothing to do anyway but dig, and so we recovered our hope or faith, if not optimism, and resumed the sledge.

The rain appeared to be lessening, or becoming finer, as the temperature dropped—sleet now, with our hair plastered to our skulls and water running down the backs of our necks, there was nowhere on us that was not soaked, so that we paused from time to time to stand briefly before the lantern, steaming as if burning, to milk a moment of warmth—and our fear now was that the mud might freeze to sludge, and then harden further overnight, like concrete, if we did not get the truck out; though how we were going to do that, with our shovels and sticks and twigs and stones puny compared to the Herculean task before us, we did not know.

I noticed a few stars appearing beyond the outer edges of the lantern’s light, felt a stirring of breeze, and in that subtle shifting a sound came to us now, the long baleful mourning of Colter-left-alone, Colter hungry and lonely: a sound so eerily and beautifully like the howl of a wolf that it could not help but ring and resonate, there in the darkness, around our campfire-like focus of the one lantern, within all the mind’s chambers of the not-so-distant past. Though our bogged-down truck was not a fallen mastodon in need of rendering, it was still a significant task before us, as our progenitors had always had tasks before them, and as Colter continued to bay and howl, it seemed very much to me that we had gone back in time or that time had moved forward and seized us, for whatever reasons, and carried us backward.

We labored on, wallowing in the frigid trough of our own making, splashing back and forth with stones and branches. I thought briefly of the elegant parties that were probably beginning around this time, down in Houston, and in Austin and Dallas, in Fort Worth and San Antonio. The women in their long glittering dresses, and the men in crisp dark suits, and all the partygoers so clean-scrubbed and tailored.

I wondered how the night’s scene must appear to Nathan and was reminded of Van Gogh’s painting, The Road Menders, one of the first paintings he made after an incarceration at a mental hospital in Arles, in the south of France—indeed, he painted it while still in his upstairs hospital room. The painting exudes the casual grace of the laborers’ physical industry and radiates a health that surely the recovering Van Gogh himself was experiencing there in the return of spring. Even the trees seem animated in the painting, and throughout there are the cool pale emerald colors of new spring, of recovery, and of vibrant hope and health and beauty, personified as well in the schematic, rectilinear step-by-step laying-down of stones into the roadbed, so that from the vantage of that upstairs window, with the warm shaded light falling over the village, it must have seemed to Van Gogh like nothing less than an avenue, a path, to salvation.

In my own labors, I glanced up to see if Nathan might have returned to the window to stare down at our work, but saw instead—with some relief—that there was only the continued blue flicker of the Ninja turtles and that the continued evidence of our futility lay for the time being obscured from his consideration.

I wondered what he would make of the evening, after it was over—I knew this logically, if not emotionally; it would someday be over—and I daydreamed, as I worked, of my own childhood, embedded in this same landscape. I recovered memories of the five of us—my father, mother, two brothers, and myself—driving up here in the spring to look at the bluebonnets; of riding around in the open-topped jeep on a weekend, smelling this wilder, more fragrant, living country, after a week, or a life, in the city; and of my brothers and I harassing the natives—leaping from the jeep to pursue fruitlessly a roadrunner or jackrabbit, or even one of the newer immigrants, an armadillo. How curious is the nature of the blood that exists in a boy, with regard to these things—and while I am sure that boys are wonderful, rare is the week even now, many years later, in which I do not think and imagine, with the weight of bittersweetness, how much my mother would have loved, as I do, knowing my daughters: watching them grow up, attending their functions, and being a grandmother to them.

We shoveled on, laboring in the freezing mixture. We knew better than to attempt our escape, our exit, prematurely—to make a few short yards, but to then slide off our underwater road and back into the muck, deeper into the muck, would be to fail spectacularly, wasting all of our previous work, and consigning our stones and branches irretrievably deeper into the muck—and so, like the road menders, we continued on, getting everything just right: plotting and planning and scheming.

It stopped raining altogether and grew colder still: wretchedly cold, though deeply beautiful, with the stars seeming to leap into the new blackness, blazing gold. It kept getting colder and colder, until I could not remember being so cold, not even in Montana. The light from the lantern began to dim, and the blue light from within the truck’s cab clicked off as Nathan curled up in the back, beneath a mound of sleeping bags, to go to sleep. Colter had stopped howling, so that it was very quiet. The only sounds were those of us sloshing around in the trenches, thigh-deep in places.

Our little underwater road was finally beginning to feel substantial, to feel possible. Lost now more in the process than in any dreamed-of or hoped-for outcome, we continued to scrounge flat stones and cedar-slats. We could walk on our little road, could feel it finally firm beneath our feet, even in the deepest of water, and dikes of slurry rose just as high above us on either side of our proposed trail home. And gradually, constructed at about a ten-degree incline, our little road—a plaza of stone and juniper—emerged from the swamp, and continued then across the surface and through the woods, like the charming boulevard in some charming country other than our own.

The stone path, the mended road, continued on in this manner a good distance out toward the sodden but firm gravel road. It was too far to lay stones and branches all the way there, but our hope was that if we could ever get the truck up out of the wallow-pit, we might be able to gather enough speed to skitter across that last distance, making it all the way to the road, where the firmness, the durability, of the road beneath us would be as great and joyous a success, as tangible a victory as we might ever hope to know. It seemed outlandish to dare to even imagine, much less wish, for such deliverance, and yet viewing our day’s work, it seemed possible, and closer than we realized.

I climbed—slithered was more like it—into the truck. Randy would push from behind, then would stand on the bumper and try to rock the springs up and down, to help the tires find traction.

From his nest in the back, Nathan roused sleepily when I started the truck and dropped it into gear. I could feel faintly Randy hopping around on the back like a monkey, or like a frail jockey urging some thunderous warhorse home—his weight made somehow even punier and lonelier by the vastness of discrepancy between ability and desire, though still he continued to hop up and down, as if trying to kick-start the world’s largest motorcycle.

I gripped the steering wheel and mashed on the gas, expecting only the heartsick whine and grease-slick spin of nothingness, but right from the very start, it was as if the truck seemed determined to climb up from out of the mud’s and the land’s grip. From the very beginning, I could feel the tires engaging with stone and wood, could hear and feel the cascade of rocks and branches thudding and clattering beneath us as the spinning wheels sorted and scrabbled through them—the tiny monkey in the back hopping wilder and faster now—and unbelievably, then, with the accelerator still shoved flat, we were slogging up and out of the pit, grinding our howling way forward, born back into the glory of movement, surging and slithering cattywampus along the general direction of the new road beneath us, threading our way perfectly between the twin landscapes of hope and despair, joy and terror.

The fear that we would slide off our narrow path, or that our progress might slow, causing us to bog down once more, was counterbalanced exactly by the flames of hope that, yes, this was reality, that despite our fears, we were still moving forward, and the world was scrolling past: oak trees, prickly pear cactus, agarita, juniper, hackberry, hickory.

And then like the evolution of joy, or like the conception, gestation, and delivery of something, the truck was out of danger, was driving as a truck should, skittering over the logs and branches just the way we’d hoped, just the way we’d planned and designed.

It was obvious to us now that as long as we stayed straight and true, we would make it—the branches were snapping and thwapping against the sides of the hurtling truck, like the beatings and croppings of some sturdier jockey spurring us on—and now so certain was our success that Randy had leapt off the back bumper and was running alongside us with a wild whooping cry, leaping for joy with outstretched pliés and tour j’etés that looked all the more ridiculous for his mud-caked boots and camouflage clothing. He reached the road at the same time that we did, and for me it was the strangest feeling to cruise to a stop on the safety of that hard-packed gravel, secure in the knowledge, no longer taken for granted, that the truck, once it stopped moving, would not begin sinking once more.

The ground was firm beneath us, and it seemed a miracle. It was almost as if we had to start over with the belief, the understanding, of such things.

Never was the luxury of a hot shower so well received. The hot water melted the ice-slab I had become, returned the fragile heat of life to my body, and perhaps most miraculously of all—in the way that moving water can do—seemed to distance us in time, disproportionately so, from the not-so-long-ago rigor of the excavation, which already seemed a thing of the past, epic and mythic.

We fired up the grill and poured stiff vodka-and-tonics and squeezed a lime into them. We sloshed gas on the pile of campfire wood and somehow got a bonfire going and sat on the porch as the steaks grilled and the potatoes baked. We looked out at the frozen stars and relived the adventure. There was still every bit as huge a vacancy in me as that which the truck had left behind—a bottomlessness, is what it felt like, and a fragility, but it felt good to have the truck safely in the barn garage, rather than still half-sunk out in the frozen wilderness, and good also to be with Randy and Nathan, and watching the fire: watching the sparks pop and float up toward the stars.

The wind had shifted again, turning even harder out of the north, and was dryer. Colter lay beside me, the fire reflecting in his dark eyes, groaning and almost purring as I petted him from time to time, with the world ahead of us, and the territory of the unknown, seeming strangely larger than it had ever been: seeming almost precisely as large as the sky and space visible in the night beyond us and in the eternity of days that would follow, were sure to follow, from this point forward, not just in our own short mortal days, but in all the days of the turning of the world-to-come.

It was impossible, I think, to feel any more insignificant against such a backdrop, and yet what a paradox that was, for how could such insignificance and tininess be the vessel, the reservoir, for such immensity of heartache, and for such fierce wonder?

That night an ice shield fell over the world, so that when I awakened on the first of January the curve of the hills and the fields and woods were all encased in starlit ice, the land’s dark reflection burning as if from some interior fire.

Nathan and Randy were sleeping in. I dressed and fixed a cup of coffee, acutely conscious of the almost mechanical advancement of time—or rather, my perception of it as thus, on this one day—and certainly, if I could have hesitated, or even gone back in time—if I could do anything to keep from going into the new year without my mother, I would have turned back, would have lingered, would have sought whatever quiet eddy there might have been, where things could continue being as they had been.

There was just enough trace of stiffness from the labors of the day before to feel good: not a true soreness, but a reminder that I had done something. The frozen gravel crunched underfoot, and the frosty air penetrated so deep when I inhaled that it seemed somehow that I might be breathing starlight: that such a thing might be possible, there in that brief and fast-dying blink of time between darkness and dawn.

The place I was going was a place I had never hunted before. During the November hunt, in a shady tangle of oak and juniper growing on a sandy flat at the juncture of a steep tributary, a narrow slot canyon down which immense granite boulders had tumbled, I had spied a torn-up sapling, so freshly scraped that the sap was still oozing from it, and the slivers and tendrils of bark that had fallen to the ground were still so bright and unoxidized as to seem still living; as if, were one to place them back upon the abraded bark of the sapling, they might yet graft and grow.

My plan was to nestle into the boulders of that crevice and to watch the sandy trail that wound through those trees along the creek, and to see if the buck that had rubbed that tree with his antlers in November, marking his territory, might wander by. I had brought a set of antlers with which to rattle, to simulate the sound of two other bucks sparring in his territory, and a grunt tube, with which to make the deep low calls of another deer.

Although I had walked every inch of these thousand acres in the darkness any number of times, both with and without a flashlight, I had never navigated my way across this landscape, nor any other that I could remember, with the world so perfectly encased in ice.

Every branch, every limb, every blade of winter-dead grass was encased in a thick chrysalis of ice, which slid heavy and away from me as I passed through the brush, and which bobbed, clacking, in my wake. The world underfoot was likewise coated with a shell of illuminated ice, and even if I had not known that it would not last, even if I had believed that this was the newer and more frightening world-to-come—that from here on out, all would be ice—I think that I still would have found it beautiful.

I crossed over the creek, which I had been able to hear roaring even from a distance: an exciting sound, so different from the usual quiet trickle, the riffling gurgle of memory. The usually clear creek was now the color of chocolate milk, and frothy with foam and roiling waves, spread wide beyond its usual perimeters. The severed branches and limbs of oaks and willows cascaded down its center, and smaller branches bobbed and wheeled crazily into the choppy eddies as if seeking an escape, and I had to pick my crossing carefully, working from memory as to where the pitch was widest, and where the little creek, once able to be jumped across and would be one day—soon—again, was narrowest.

Darkness, ice, flood: I had never seen such a world before, yet it made perfect sense to me. I inhabited it gracefully, like a guest arriving right on time. The high wind above continued to scrub the stars bright and burnished, and I made my way over the slippery ice hills to the secret cleft from which I would hunt that morning and settled in out of the wind, pulled on another coat for warmth, and then was motionless, as if having been claimed by the landscape, absorbed like nothing more than so much of the night-before’s rain.

I could hear the creek below me, still roaring and charging: the perfect shadow, perfect systolic pulse from the steady torrents of the day before, which had spent all night charging down every other hill and every other creek in order to arrive at this creek, this one place, at this one point in time, and then carrying on past.

Yesterday’s flood, arriving today—late, and yet on time—from other places I knew, a weaving of names that would mean nothing, or next-to-nothing, to those who did not know those places or names, but that meant the world to me: White Oak Creek, Buffalo Creek, Willow Creek, Coal Creek.

By afternoon, these same charging waters—the ones I could hear but not see—would be nearer to San Antonio; by the next evening, or the following morning, to the estuaries of the Gulf, and then amongst the silt- and sand-colored waves of ocean surf.

In the pre-dawn darkness I found a hiding place beneath an older, larger juniper that was growing between the symmetrical halves of a frost-split granite boulder, each boulder-half the size of an upright refrigerator, and I settled in to wait for daylight and to watch the canyon and the sandy little grove of oak and juniper below. I thought about nothing, merely waited.

An hour, two hours, melted as if but a second, though not the ice. I didn’t move. It felt good to remain so still, so motionless, lulled by the cold blue wind from the north and by the sound of the water, the quick flood.

There were no clouds. The rising sun touched the tips of the bright winter-green junipers on the rim of the other side of the canyon first and then began painting slowly but steadily with its yellow winterlight the vegetation and boulders beneath that rim, the light descending into the canyon, brush stroke by brush stroke, and onto my camouflaged hiding spot: though still the ice-shell held, so that the ice-casts of all things burned now not with starlight but with the fractal radiance of diamonds and rainbows.

I sat entranced, almost as if not daring, or as if forgetting, to breathe, until finally I felt a faint stirring of warmth on my face, the winter sun finally beginning to catch, and the dazzle began to loosen from the hills, the prismatic colors sliding and slipping away from all that was cloaked with the once-shining ice. The sparkle vanished, yet in its place, the vibrant colors of the native landscape and native vegetation were revealed as if born again, fresh-scrubbed and bright.

Still I waited, almost perfectly motionless, and was content to do so: listening, watching, waiting. Every half hour, I would blow quietly on the grunt tube or click the drybone antlers together lightly, rattling their tines against one another. Those sounds would be lost beneath the blue sky, but I did not despair, I had all day, and I rested there between the cleaved rocks and watched the canyon before me and continued to rest or reside in that space where hours were confused with moments.

When the buck came in to his grove, he was moving quickly, almost at a trot. His body, light brown, was pale and clean, as if washed by the rain. He was a large deer with large antlers that were surprisingly pale—almost sun-bleached—and as he hurried down the canyon, passing me on my right side, only twenty yards away, I saw that his black hooves were shiny, as if newly polished, and the late morning sun caught his eyes so that they gleamed.

I lifted the rifle quickly but carefully—he paused, detecting that movement between him and the sun—and finding the seam behind his shoulder at the top of the heart, I fired.

He leapt hump-backed, stumbled, and then galloped down the trail he’d been on, as if merely in more of a hurry now to reach that grove of trees, and though I felt confident he was mortally wounded, that he would run but a few more bounds and then collapse, heartshot, I knew better than to jump up and follow, which might cause him to draft one final surge of adrenaline, giving him the strength to carry him far beyond my ken or reach.

I continued waiting, and only now began to daydream, and to think about the conscious world, the real world of the present: of the fact that it was New Year’s Day and that I had just hunted and shot, and was about to gather, a fine deer. I wondered if Randy and Nathan were back in camp, or if they were out hunting in the bright cool sun. I listened to the rush of the briefly wide creek below, admired the sun-painted cliffs and rocks on the other side of the canyon a little longer, and then rose, stretching my legs, and walked over to where the deer had been standing when I’d shot, where I found, as I’d known I would, a scatter of hair and some drops of bright red blood, still shining wet upon the granite and in the pinkened gravel of the game trail.

For how many tens of thousands of years have hunters known such a mix of feelings—the satisfaction of success mixed with the fuller evidence of the responsibility inherent in the taking of any food from the earth, whether planted crop or harvested wild? The weight of our own existence, made so startlingly manifest; the going-on.

I followed the drops of blood straight down the trail, walking carefully, and I remained confident that the body of the deer would be just a little farther on, around the next bend—in the cool of that little grove, perhaps, pitched down into the sand.

In the grove, there was less blood, but the trail was still evident. The deer was taking longer leaps, the leaves were stirred up from each track, and now and again I found another loosened hair, another Rorschach of bright red blood cradled in the brown grasp of an upturned leaf.

I followed the trail out of the trees and across the sand and back onto the puddled stone of slickrock that pitched down toward the wide-rushing rain-swollen creek. There was a little ledge spanning the creek just a few yards upstream, a ledge across which I could usually walk, but that was covered now with the wide rush of the flood, and over which cascaded the sheet of a little waterfall.

I bent and studied the blood sign. The drops led straight to the creek. I looked across the creek to the other side—too far for me to leap, but not for a deer—and saw the stippling of tracks from where deer regularly leapt this crossing. I did not see the brown body of the deer lying down, pitched over onto its side. I did not see the great nest of antlers cradled in the grass just a short distance ahead, visible above even the winter-dead remains of grass and brush, the sight that usually greets the successful hunter.

Walking carefully, and starting to feel the first inklings of concern and doubt, I went upstream to the crossing place and made my way carefully across the flatrock ledge, the broad roiling sheet of water shuddering against my ankles, not quite over the tops of my boots, the water so silt-clouded from the flood that I could not see the stone beneath me.

I reached the other side and hurried over to the spot where the deer’s leap would have carried him—the spot where all those other tracks were stippled, like the prints of long-jumpers in a sand pit—and being careful not to disturb any, I set my rifle against a tree and got down on my hands and knees in the storm-wet grass and began parsing among the tracks, hoping for the surest indicator, the brilliance of blood, and, failing that, another piece of hair—possibly this deer’s, possibly not—and, failing that, a divot of earth so freshly torn that the individual sand grains were still glistening: a line, then, a cast of direction to set off into, in my blindness.

I didn’t see how the shot could be anything other than precise at that distance, but if my aim had somehow floated a few inches, penetrating the lungs but not touching the heart, then the deer—particularly a big muscular deer like this one—could in theory run for hours, on-again and off-again, before bedding down somewhere miles away beneath a tree, or in a nest of brush, remaining vigilant, even if incapacitated, for days.

That is not the nature of what deer do when they are hurt badly, however. Their nature when mortally wounded is to return immediately and directly to the core of their home, stop and hunker down, and wait to heal.

I did not think this deer was hit in the lungs, though, nor in any other lesser place. I felt certain this deer had been struck in the heart, and even as I continued searching on my hands and knees for the most microscopic of clues, I kept glancing up into the meadow, believing that I was simply overlooking the body, as often happens: the hundred and fifty pounds of deer somehow suddenly vanishing, lying down instead of standing, and lifeless rather than alive. Everything disappearing almost immediately back into the protective coloration of the deer’s native home, back into the time-crafted perfect camouflage of native vegetation: everything except the crown of antlers, which, when upright, blend perfectly with the branches of the forest, but which, when pitched sideways in the middle of a field, appear as incongruous as the detached harrow for a farmer’s tractor. What was once hidden gracefully, meshed into the safety of the natural world, the human eye is drawn to, and quickly. As if all can find death immediately, while the task of finding life remains so much more challenging.

I spent the rest of the day tracking, often on my hands and knees, or in a bent stoop, moving slowly: following one unraveling radial of tracks after another, as far into the forest as I could, before that skein vanished, or became entangled with another. I panicked that I would lose this deer—that I had lost it—and then I despaired. To lose any deer, or any animal, but especially a great one, is one of the sourest feelings a hunter can know, rearranging and nearly invalidating what is already a complex and highly evolved moral negotiation in the short realm between life and death. Often the hunter feels like weeping, or is paralyzed with grief when such a misfortune occurs, and may quit hunting for a year, or other times altogether.

I had no way of knowing if the tracks and trails I followed were those that my deer had taken or those of dozens of others. Over on the back side of the deer pasture, up and over the top of Buck Hill, nearly a mile from where I had shot, I found a drop of fresh blood on a rock, and, believing it to be from my deer—for no one else had fired a shot—I worked that area hard, hoping to find the deer bedded down under a tree, waiting to die, or dead. There were no other clues that I could find, out on the rocks like that, to indicate in which direction the animal had been traveling, or the nature of the wound, or even if the blood was that of a deer.

I searched until dark, casting in wider and wider circles around that one mysterious drop of blood, with each deerless hour that passed reducing proportionately the already faint hope that I would find this deer.

I had examined and re-examined every square inch of the back side: I was convinced there was no dead deer back there. It occurred to me, with the slimmest of hopes, that this blood drop had nothing to do with my deer and that perhaps I had simply overlooked my deer there at the creek. I hiked back that long mile to where I had shot the deer and played it all over again: followed the initial heavy blood sign right down to the creek, then crossed on that ledge, and examined the other side, where still I could find nothing.

I went back to the blood side yet again and this time went up and down the stream, searching, wondering if the deer might have stopped at the wild creek, panicked by its injury and by the creek’s unfamiliar, flood-swollen state, and veered left or right, but here, too, I could discern no tracks, blood, or hair.

There was still a little bit of light left in the day. I decided to go back to camp and see if Randy and Nathan were in, to get them to help me search, and to bring Colter along on a leash to see if he, with his incredible bird-finding nose, might be inspired to investigate the area in such a way as to give me a hint whether the deer had turned and run along the creek bank upstream or downstream. Indeed, it was my hope that if the deer was piled up somewhere nearby, dead under a juniper bush, Colter might point this out to me, that he might pull me over in that direction, tugging on his leash, urging me to investigate an area I had bypassed.

Randy and Nathan were gone when I got back to camp, so I made a quick sandwich, left a note, got Colter, and headed back out. I’d been walking all day, slowly but ceaselessly, and was tired. I had also been feeling uncomfortable back in camp, separated from the deer like that, or separated from the search.

I took Colter directly to the canyon, where the blood had dried from red to brown. Already it looked like something ancient, even geologic, rather than the legacy of anything that had happened mere hours ago.

Colter dropped his nose to the spot anyway, suddenly electric with interest, and holding his leash, I puzzled over how sage he seemed in that moment: as if, in that single scent, he was able to delve into and discern that which had happened in the past, as well as casting ahead to the future, and the knowledge not only of where that deer had been, but also of where it might yet be.

Stub tail twitching, he followed the trail quickly down to the creek, then snuffled hurriedly left and right. Whether he was nosing out my earlier scent from where I had tracked up and down the creek or was still detecting the deer’s scent, I had no real way of knowing, although I was grateful for his enthusiasm.

As I had done, he hurried across the creek on the rock ledge—the water had already dropped several inches, so that the stone was dimly visible, though the water was still fast and turbulent and crawfish-colored—and hot on the trail now, with me hurrying along behind, still gripping the leash, he ran a few more steps, heading toward the tracked-up sandpit, where I had anticipated the deer to land, but then Colter stopped, slamming on the brakes so hard that I tripped over him.

So suddenly did he halt, and so confused did he seem, that I thought he might have gotten wind of a sluggish January water moccasin. And like a snake charmer himself, he lifted his broad head and stared back upwind, across to the other side of the creek, across the plunge-pool that sat relatively serene below the little waterfall.

With his muscles beginning to quiver and tense, he lifted one paw, cautious at first—as if he was receiving a contradiction of the senses, as if he could not quite believe that which the natural world was telling him—but then, increasingly confident, he tucked that left paw all the way tight against his chest and crouched, striking the beautiful pose of dog-on-point.

I stood there puzzled for several seconds, wondering if he was only just now picking up the blood-scent that I thought I had already shown to him. This wasn’t what I wanted at all, and carefully, I tugged on his leash, hoping to entice him into walking farther downstream.

He was staunch, however, and would not release to my tug. His green eyes bulged and burned with an odd mix of confusion and certainty, and I knelt to pat him on his chest, and to thank him for his intensity if not his accuracy, and to urge him along. There was so little time left in the day.

It was only then, down at eye level with him, that I saw the world from his perspective, and saw the deer’s antlers sticking up from the center of the mudwater pond below the falls, with only the very candelabra tips sticking up: five or six of the very tip-tops of the longer tines, only an inch or two above water, so that at first glance, or no-glance, they would have appeared like the tips of a big tree limb that had been washed downstream.

Colter eased his nose forward. The antler-branches were almost close enough to reach out and touch. And though I was looking right at them, and recognized them now as the top inch-tips of antlers, I could not yet reconcile the transition, in my mind, of how the entire body of a huge deer could be reduced now to but an inch, or two inches, of bone. The antlers themselves were almost the same color as the medium in which they now resided.

Still gripping Colter’s leash, I eased forward, squinting, and now—as much by faith or hope at first, as by true visual acuity—I could see dimly the outline of the submerged deer, with the deer’s underwater silhouette still almost as much a function of imagination as reality, and the deer’s coat almost the exact color of brown as the night-before’s floodwaters.

I thanked Colter and gave general thanks to the deer and to the world, too—I had definitely not found this deer; it had found me, had been delivered to me—and I reached out and gripped the underwater antlers and pulled the deer to shore, dragged it up onto the grass on the other side of the creek, not thirty yards from where I had shot. It was a huge deer, as large a deer as I had ever killed on the deer pasture, and Colter released himself from his point and began sniffing at the deer, checking it out, running all around it and nosing it, as if surprised and agitated at this strange revelation that he, even with all his millennial innate wisdom, had never previously understood—that creatures like deer, and, who knew now, perhaps even quail and doves and pheasants, might be found beneath us, in some other, lower world’s layer.

I petted him, congratulated him, and sat there in the dusk with our discovery, our little miracle, there in the bluing of twilight, on that cold clear first day of January.

It was a marvel and an amazement to me that a thing I had so desired could be given to me, returned to me, in such dramatic and miraculous fashion, even as the heavier and colder knowledge returned to me all over again that there were other things, much more desired, that would never be forthcoming: that I would have to be forever-after content with memories, thoughts, and recollections, and those strange quiet moments of communion when the two worlds, the departed and the still-here, yet occasionally intersect and transact, as if between the thin layers of some larger world, or two worlds, above and beneath the surface.

I still felt alone, there above the surface, though it was a beautiful surface, the one she had brought me out into—and, grateful for that, despite my sorrow, I hauled the deer up into the woods and cleaned it, as the men in our family had always hunted deer back when she had still been living, and then I started back to camp in darkness, with Colter trotting alongside me, and my rifle in one hand, and dragging the heavy deer behind.